Last week, Mr. Ryan unveiled his budget proposal, and the initial reaction of much of the punditocracy was best summed up (sarcastically) by the blogger John Cole: “The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious?”

The truth is that Republicans have nothing to offer but lies marinated in bullshit to make them, oddly enough, more palatable. Krugman's losing competitors love nothing more than to dish out copious, self-composting dumpster loads of nonsense well-aligned with the Republican marketing of snow to Eskimos. No, stop me, marketing snow to Eskimos would be better than what the GOP does. Republicans market laetrile to men with erectile dysfunction. Or lawn service to gila monsters. Or bicycles to fish.

Clear-eyed as always, Krugman is of course more serious than my arrant dismissal, though no less dismissive:

Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.

On Wednesday, as I said, the president called Mr. Ryan’s bluff: after offering a spirited (and reassuring) defense of social insurance, he declared, “There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill.” Actually, the Ryan plan calls for $2.9 trillion in tax cuts, but who’s counting?

Again, the Republicans don't give the slightest shit about deficits, except as leverage to reward the wealthy with further spoils of their total victory in class warfare.

It’s not nice to say this (but the truth is rarely nice): whatever they may say, Republicans are not concerned, above all, about the deficit. In fact, it’s not clear that they care about the deficit at all; they’re trying to use deficit concerns to push through their goal of dismantling the Great Society and if possible the New Deal; they have stated explicitly that they want to reduce taxes on high incomes to pre-New-Deal levels. And it’s an article of faith on their part that low taxes have magical effects on the economy.

Read it all. He also hits our shared point about the misuse of civility.